Agile2018

Abstract:
Have you ever been faced with an 'extreme' challenge that you needed to resolve very quickly - but didn't have a clue how to solve it? Imagine developing the ability to learn real time from these kinds of challenges as they emerge. Developing this rare capability is at the heart of sustainable transformation. Conventional wisdom tells us that we need to develop an exhaustive set of training materials and workshops to develop the myriad skills to successfully lead large scale transformations. Advances in neuroscience, however, are telling us that what matters most is rapid recall – and that requires an agile mindset as well as anchoring and layering action learning to coherently change our behavior and build habits over time. This is best achieved through weaving learning and breakthrough insights into our daily workflows. This interactive workshop will provide some surprising insights from the latest breakthroughs in how we learn, and provide some practical takeaways on how to self assess on the differentiating skills we need to focus on and how to create an action based personal development plan to get started on our personal path to learning agility. This workshop is targeted to learners at all levels as well as coaches, and learning professionals associated with any organization preparing for, or in the process of, an enterprise-wide agile transformation or interested in gaining a competitive advantage in todays volatile business environment.

Learning Outcomes:

• Recognize and understand preconditions and differentiating capabilities to focus on developing to accelerate personal and organizational learning agility
• Infer and understand the importance of self awareness and how to generate a self assessment to baseline and monitor core learning agility capabilities
• Recognize and understand why it’s important to assess how cognitive biases and mental models distort and block our ability to learn
• Create an action plan to incorporate critical enablers into a personal learning development plan; and playbook to identify and avoid common traps
• Acquire a practical playbook of free tools to apply to your teams and organization

Attachments:

• Agile2018_Learning Agility Learning Lab_Final.pdf

Abstract:
Want to be ready for anything that comes your way? Want to thrive in the face of uncertainty? Want to develop a process for learning and laughing throughout life? Or just want to get a taste of what Saturday Night Live cast members do?
Learn how to learn, how to fail with grace, and do it all with a smile during this interactive improv session.
Improv creates a psychologically safe place for experimentation, learning to make mistakes with grace, challenge ourselves and face our fears in a safe space, so that when we experience challenges in the “real world” we can also handle those mistakes and challenges with grace and courage.
During this session, we’ll do improv games and exercises, popularized by theatres that have trained the world’s best improvisers and comedians, including Tina Fey, Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Amy Poehler, and more. It is an interactive session where there will be movement and participation from all participants, and it will be a lot of fun and laughter!
This session is targeted at managers and leaders inside the company who want to develop their own fearlessness and sense of play, as well as walk away with the tools and methodologies to inspire this fearlessness and sense of play amongst their teams.
Session attendees can expect to leave this session with:

• Ideas for how to learn and inspire learning, with fun and laughter
• Less fear
• Having discovered how to bring the spirit of play into their daily adult lives and company
• A methodology for learning and practicing failure, in a safe and fun environment
• A way to handle changing environments and the changing learning needs of others
• A strengthened ability to think quickly
• Exercises and games they can play with their teams and families to share their ways of practicing failure and developing fearlessness
• A huge smile on their face!

Learning Outcomes:

• Learn how to learn and inspire learning, with fun and laughter
• Leave with less fear and learn how to act with courage in your work and life
• Learn how to bring the spirit of play into your daily adult lives and company
• Learn a methodology for learning and practicing failure, in a safe and fun environment
• Learn ways to handle changing environments and the changing learning needs of others
• Leave with a strengthened ability to think quickly
• Learn exercises and games you can play with your teams and families to share their ways of practicing failure and developing fearlessness
• Leave with a huge smile on your face!

Abstract:
When advised by their doctors that they need to change their habits or they will die of a heart attack, only three out of ten people can successfully make the changes requested. Hard changes are hard not because of a lack of desire or willpower, but because our brains evolved a natural immunity to change. Unexamined, this immunity puts the brakes on difficult personal and organizational changes.
In this session, attendees will learn how to use a simple set of practices to become aware of the hidden competing commitments that impede our ability to make meaningful change. These hidden competing commitments point to big assumptions that we have not yet challenged. The output of the process is a set of safe to fail experiments that help us challenge our big assumptions, easing our brains into new possibility.
So, come with an important personal change that you've been contemplating or struggling with, and leave with excitement about your experiment to finally break through!

Learning Outcomes:

• The difference between an adaptive and a technical change
• Why willpower doesn't work for adaptive changes
• A simple tool to map our personal immunity to change & discover small experiments to help us finally move forward

Abstract:
What we did in the 90s seemed unthinkable, given the prevalent business wisdom of the time. Labelling it "Agile" in 2001 did not make it any more understandable to the mainstream. Even today, we see people in classrooms or organisations who believe we are talking about a different world...
And we are: Agility at its best is like magic to others. Let's use that for a different kind of learning! I want to explore magical metaphors with you as a method for reflection and learning.
Let's use some Headology, redeem the Dark Lord, employ the Patronus Effect, understand Horcruxes and Apparition... The magical literature is full of metaphors that we can employ for our work in changing organisations. Metaphors make complex things simpler to communicate.
I'm going to take you through several stories of magical, life-changing experiences, and let you explore your own using the power of metaphor and Clean Language. You'll leave with increased confidence in what only you can do: your magic.

Learning Outcomes:

• Increased confidence and courage that what we are doing is great and valuable and doesn't need fitting in.
• Employ Clean Language questions to support Learning in a new and very effective way.
• Embrace and explore how what you have been doing is magical - inexplicable, surprising, and awesome!
• Know that it doesn't stop being magic just because we know how it's done.
• Feel ready to pursue a strategy to introduce agile that uses awe and wonder and inspiration rather than fulfilling structure and process expectations.
• Dare to be unsafe, unfitting, and ridiculous.

Abstract:
Software, like art, can be subjective and our appreciation of it influenced by our own personal views and tastes. The fine arts have long cultivated a processes for students and teachers to process feedback on both the objective and subjective aspects of works in a clear, helpful and kind way. This process, known as “Critiquing” aims to give the artist meaningful feedback on how others see their art so they may grow and improve. In this workshop we will teach software development teams the formal process of critiquing and how to apply it to demos or even code reviews.

Learning Outcomes:

• At the end of the workshop students should know the different parts of a formal art critique. They should be able to give a meaningful critique to someone and should also understand how to receive criticism and know what their options are for responding to it.

Abstract:
"Going to Agile 2018 and missing this session is like staying up all night writing a 40-page term paper and forgetting to hit Save" - You
With the success of regional agile conferences, more and more attendees show up with the desire to learn new Agile practices. Unfortunately, our brains are wired to forget most of the stuff we pick up at those conferences. Within one week most of us will forget 90% of what we learned at Agile2018. But using Brain Science, this workshop counteracts that effect by contextualizing “cool things” you picked up with real-world situations, putting the learner into the teacher role, and establishing follow up partnerships to reinforce learnings.
The common question many have after a day or two of sessions is what to do with all of these learnings. While some presentations have key takeaways worth implementing on their own, many of the concepts could be used in conjunction with others. The brainstorming principle of combining and refining might apply to the sessions we attend.
Participants will:

• Crowdsource techniques and skills they remember from the week (don’t worry about if you don’t remember it exactly).
• Create a Problem Canvas to experiment on.
• Dry-run execution of technique and enhance it in a safe space.
• Combine and Refine: Swap groups to try a different technique-> problem fit
• Let's get real: Create a community using Slack to find out what really happens when people apply these.

Learning Outcomes:

• - Strengthen the muscle memory by dry running a technique you heard during the conference on a psuedo real-life problem.
• - Learn more techniques and skills from talks that you missed.
• - Discover the mesh points between concepts.
• - Know when’s the right time to try something.
• - Get constructive feedback on how to improve delivery of that technique via a Teach-Reinforce-Enhance framing structure
• - After the Conference: Find out whether execution of those techniques worked as planned or didn’t

Abstract:
"I'm tired of repeating myself." As a leader, I said this numerous times. However, I tried to fix the wrong problem: I must not have told them clearly enough. In reality, my problem was that was I telling. After understanding how people learn best from Training from the Back of the Room, I accepted my current approach was insufficient. Lecturing others or simply stating “you’re now empowered”; rarely gets the intended results. People are skeptical about something until they experience it. Join Tricia to engage first-hand in the power of using exercises to experience a key value/message. Together, we will dissect and explore interactive exercises to gain insights on how they deliver important learnings including self-organization, multi-tasking, communication, wisdom of the crowd, vulnerability, and responding to change. Leave with tools that you can apply tomorrow to stop telling people and start helping people experience.

Learning Outcomes:

• - Explain why experiential learning is more powerful than reading/hearing
• - Facilitate six tools/exercises to provide key learnings
• - Learn facilitation techniques to debrief exercises for critical learning retention

Abstract:
Nearly everybody has been to the Gym. You go in January 2nd, they show you around, give you a little coaching, you pay your dues… and you never go back. You know you should though. You really ought to, but you’re very busy. Does that remind you of your typical agile training experience?
But what if we did things differently? What if instead of signing up for a 2 day class, you were to join an Agile gym. Maybe twice each week you go into the gym to “work out”. Perhaps you could join others on occasional expeditions to test your skills. What if the gym became a place where experimentation took place and the results were shared with the members?
Together we will explore the ideas behind creating an Agile Gymnasium: a place where training is based on experimental results. A place where training improves your performance in the real world.

Learning Outcomes:

• Learn how to apply experimentation to agile training methods
• Explore new models for bringing long term training to teams
• Learn categories of learning activities that can be used for training, expeditions, and in the real world

Attachments:

• The Agile Gymnasium.pdf

Abstract:
What are the scariest things your organizations and teams encounter? What are they too afraid to discuss, and smart enough not to ignore?
To learn from our mistakes we need to be brave enough to face them (and have enough fun we want to do it again). In this monster movie themed workshop we'll use activities based on some of the best (and worst) monster movies of all time to help teams surface and face the things they are too afraid to discuss.
To break the ice we'll run through the biggest and scariest problems a sample of Agile teams reported. Then we will work together to discuss your own and uncover possible solutions. When you're done you'll have a series of quick exercises you can take back to your teams so you can face those fears together. And usually only half the attendees need to sleep with the light on that night....

Learning Outcomes:

• Use a series of games and activities to surface issues students are afraid to confront.
• Demonstrate how humor and interactive activities can release tension and abate fear.
• Create a plan to overcome their particular work related fears with buy-in from their team.

Attachments:

• Bump in the Night Presentation - Agile 2018 v2.pdf